Discover the world of UI design, a vital component of digital design that focuses on the visual appearance of applications. Learn why UI design skills are highly sought after, the roles and salaries in this field, and how to use video tutorials and professional training to kickstart your career.

UI Design Videos & Online Tutorials

UI design is the component of digital design that focuses on building the visual appearance of digital applications. UI design skills teach creatives how to build evocative, memorable digital applications through combining text, graphics, and images. Watching video tutorials online is a popular method of learning UI Design. Video learning lets students control the pace of their education, it allows them to control the direction that their education takes more freely, and the low upfront cost of these videos lets students more freely change direction. This article will cover a range of videos, including what they teach and where to find them.

What is UI Design?

UI design is the field of graphic design concerned with how digital applications look and how they communicate information to users. UI designers ensure that a digital application looks appealing and communicates effectively with its audience. UI Designers will create digital assets using graphic design programs and then build layouts and prototypes of those layouts to share for collaboration and testing. UI design pairs closely with UX design. UI designs concern themselves with how the digital application looks, whereas UX Designers concern themselves with how the digital application feels. These two fields work closely enough together that often, one designer will do both.

Visual and graphic design skills are vital to the field of UI design. UI Designers will need to learn how to utilize a variety of different graphic design programs, and they will need to understand theories and philosophies of composition. Images and graphics communicate a large amount of information in a small space, and it is the job of UI Designers to ensure that the information a digital application communicates aligns with the desired message that a client seeks to send. This will mean that UI design focuses heavily on any project's small details, assuring that all design elements come together to communicate ideas effectively. UI design is thus concerned with both the big picture design of a digital application and the visual design of the various individual components that are used to build the appearance of that digital application.

Read more about what UI design is and why you should learn it. 

What Can You Do with UI Design?

Training in UI design will help creatives build vibrant and instantly memorable web designs and user interfaces for digital applications. UI Designers can blend text, images, and graphics to create functional and evocative designs using the various design programs. Unlike traditional graphic design projects, UI design projects will let creatives maximize the affordances of the digital canvas they are given, and UI Designers will be able to create digital layouts that communicate effectively and quickly. With so much modern communication happening over the internet, learning UI design is a powerful tool for expressing the interests of oneself and one’s organization.

UI design is also a useful skill for creatives who aren’t necessarily planning to build a career out of their graphic design training but still want to optimize their digital presence or their organization. Given the number of web applications designed to ease the process of web development, individuals can start designing and building digital applications for themselves or their organizations without only a little bit of UI design training. This is a bonus for small businesses, up-and-coming charities or nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and any other interest group that may want to build a web presence but is hesitant to hire professional Web Designers.

Finally, learning UI design can give existing creatives an entirely new medium to express their ideas. While web design is concerned with the functional elements of a digital application, learning UI design will allow artists and designers to build unique installations and projects that would otherwise be impossible to construct in a physical space. While most people receiving UI design training will do so with professionalization, learning how to build assets and art pieces online can give artists a new space to experiment with their creative ideas.

Why Are Video Tutorials Helpful When Learning UI Design?

There are many reasons that new UI design students may wish to turn to video tutorials to begin their training. While these videos won’t be able to replace professional instruction fully, they can complement that instruction or serve to onboard students to more advanced learning. Video tutorials are also ideal for students looking to learn more about UI design at their own pace or who are hesitant to invest too much time and money into a course.

Since students can pause and rewind videos and fast-forward them or navigate using timestamps, video tutorials give students significantly more control over the pace of their learning than more traditional training methods. Students can rewind to go over a difficult concept at any time, pause the video if they need to set it down and navigate the video to pick and choose what skill they want to practice next. 

Since video tutorials often have a very low upfront cost (many are free), they are also ideal for students who are still unsure of exactly what they want to do with their UI design training. This has two advantages. First, it lets students start learning the basics of UI design in a risk-free environment since they won’t be spending any money to enroll in a course. Second, it makes changing direction much easier because it costs minimal time and money to either move from one video to another or to stop a certain video altogether. Since there is so little risk involved, this also lets students explore more options and be more experimental than they might otherwise be.

Types of UI Design Videos

For students interested in UI design tutorials, there are many options available. YouTube and other video platforms have made it easy for students to find many different videos that teach the basics of UI Design.

The most common videos are pre-recorded seminars that mirror the look and feel of an online training course. Noble offers several free introductory courses through its website and official YouTube page. Noble offers a free Intro to UI Design course and a free Intro to Figma course. These courses will cover the basic elements of design philosophy and the basic functions of one of the market's most common UI design tools. These courses can help students become more comfortable with the ideas and programs they will practice during more advanced training courses.

In addition, Noble offers many pre-recorded courses covering web design and development concepts and graphic design concepts on their YouTube page. These video recordings will help students understand tools like Photoshop and Illustrator or design platforms like WordPress. These training options are ideal for students looking to get a taste of the various flavors of graphic design and who aren’t yet confident that UI design is right for them.

The second kind of video tutorial is a narrow skills instruction video that teaches students one specific element of UI design, such as how to use text or add color in Figma. These videos are ideal for students who want to jump from topic to topic and who want to study in short bursts. The YouTube algorithm, in particular, rewards these kinds of videos, so many of them are available. Students can easily find dozens of videos covering fairly UI design topics if they are interested in looking.

A final video tutorial is a process-focused walkthrough where a creative or designer demonstrates the step-by-step process for taking a project from start to finish. These videos are ideal for process-oriented learners and students who understand basic UI design principles but want to see those skills implemented.

Why Learn UI Design?

More so than ever, companies and organizations are investing large amounts of money and resources into their digital presence. Web design is booming; the mobile app industry has been growing for years, and building a coherent online brand identity is incredibly important to new businesses and organizations. These concerns are partly addressed by specialists working in UI design, as the look of a digital application informs and colors users’ first impressions of a product. Learning UI design skills will position students to enter the visual and graphic design field, focusing on the fast-growing digital side of the industry.

In addition, UI design training will provide students with valuable knowledge of visual design and communication theories. So much modern communication, particularly online, is done through graphic design projects, so learning the ins and outs of UI design can add another layer to a student's understanding of how to communicate ideas using only visual elements of design effectively. This training will make them better communicators and better equipped to understand the visual strategies employed by other graphic designers in different fields.

Finally, learning UI design is a great way to learn many transferable career skills applicable to creatives in most industries. UI Designers will work with specialized user experience design tools, but they will also work with more generic creative tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. This means that learning UI design will help students hone skills they can apply to any creative project, whether digital or otherwise. This makes learning UI design ideal for aspiring creatives who aren’t yet entirely sure that there is a specific medium they will be working in for the rest of their careers.

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How Difficult is It to Learn UI Design?

UI design can be a fairly difficult skill to master at first because of the sheer number of tools users will need to learn how to use. Most UI Designers will need to know at least one user experience design tool, a photo manipulation tool, an illustration tool, a prototyping tool, and several other graphic design tools. This means that while novices can easily pick up individual skills, students may encounter more obstacles than they otherwise would, owing to the number of skills they will be trained in.

Likewise, there are no upfront costs to UI design as a skill, but new designers will need many tools to fully prepare themselves for a creative career building UIs. Licensing a web layout tool is a must; novice designers will likely need to license other graphic design software to build digital elements and construct creative and unique sample interfaces. This means that the cost of building UIs may vary from person to person, depending on the programs that they are using.

There are no formal prerequisites required to learn UI design, but there are a few skills worth brushing up on before entering a training program. Students should be familiar with and comfortable using a computer and design software. Additionally, it is worth knowing a bit about current graphic and UX design trends before setting out, as it can help students avoid common pitfalls that new designers may make.

Read about how difficult it is to learn UI design.

Learn UI Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Once students have committed to learning UI design, they can receive hands-on training in one of the many UI design classes offered through Noble Desktop. These courses, available both in-person at Noble’s Manhattan campus and online, provide students with career-focused skills training in an industry-recognized educational environment. Students will benefit from working with live instructors who can answer their questions, provide feedback, and help them overcome any learning challenges they encounter. Even online, Noble’s classes boast small class sizes so that students can receive individual attention from their instructors. Plus, Noble offers free retake options, meaning that a student can re-enroll in a completed course within one year to receive additional training, review material, or just get a bit more hands-on UI design experience.

Students looking to learn the basics of UI design may wish to consider enrolling in Noble’s UI Design Bootcamp. This course will provide students with hands-on experience, using practical examples, designing the appearance of web pages and mobile applications. Students will receive training in the basic theories of composition and design and one-on-one feedback from expert instructors on the make-up of their UI design projects. This course is ideal for students hoping to learn the ins and outs of how to apply their existing knowledge of visual design tools to the process of building digital applications. Students who wish to enroll in this course should have a working knowledge of the user experience design tool Figma. Students looking for this training can enroll in Noble’s Figma Bootcamp.

Noble offers a UI Design Certificate program for students who want a more career-focused learning experience that will teach students all of the important fundamental skills they will need to enter the workforce as UI design specialists. Students will learn theories of composition and design and how to apply those theories of design to web pages and digital applications. In addition, students will learn how to use design tools like Figma, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator. This course caps off with a series of lessons concerning how to build a design portfolio to take onto the job market. With portfolio design training, one-on-one career mentorship, and the reception of an industry-recognized skills certificate, this course is ideal for students looking to build new careers in UI design.